Can I Haz Rankings? Oh Yesss!

Archive for September, 2009

Twitting is about to become the next big thing on the Internet, and if you want to get involved in this new trend before it goes massive, then there is a great new site where you can do all of the twitting in one place. Twitter has been launched by a major friend of mine , and he is pretty confident that he’s going to have thousands of people on there twittering to each other all the time.

Anyway, it is a great idea to register for a twittering account on Twitter so that you can twit to people, and it is also a great source of high quality links that include good quality Page Ranks.

SEO Cock Stars is on the Twitter already, you can follow us by clicking here, and then you can keep up with everything that we do.

One of the hottest areas in SOE right now is the implementation of route augmentation on websites to improve the user friendliness of the web interface. Although the actual science of route implementation is highly complex and requires thorough knowledge of high level techniques such as interaction probability vectors, it is becoming a very important tool in the armoury of a good SOE, as modern search engine robots like the Googler are very much like real people when they come to your web pages, and there are certain things that you need to do.

When most people look at a website, they do not realise how important certain parts of the page are for the Googler, and how much of a website is only there to help the Googler find things. Meta Keywords and the like are completely invisible to users, but are very much a requirement to help a website to rank. It is also important to include overt signals to the Googler to add significant augmentation layers to the website’s usability.

A typical interaction vector diagram is shown below, and indicates how the Googler reacts to a normal web page:

This is how a Googler normally interacts with the page

A simple change such as making one of the links a different colour can make a big difference to the probability vectoring that the Googler uses, and augment their route through the site:

In this version of the interaction vector, the Googler has a greater probability of visiting one page over the other

It is possible to perform route augmentation through a variety of different means, and all of them will have a different interaction probability vectoring impact on use. The example above uses red text, and increases the probability of the Googler visiting a particular page by exactly 50%. As the Googler prefers green text, a link that is green, will increase the probability vector by 67.4%.

Other page modification metrics that most people will overlook include link placement, the use of images, and even text that flickers. It is important to experiment with the probability vectoring that you use for route augmentation in your website, and consider what impact it will have by asking Google via their feedback form.

I was chatting with a couple of my best SOE friends this afternoon, and they were stressing the importance of getting as many Page Ranks as possible for client’s websites. This is something that I have long advocated, and I was glad to see that other SOE people have come around to the idea.

Often, people who are new to the SOE world of meta tags and vertical semantic integration really struggle with what Page Ranks are and why they need them. In my introduction to SOE seminars, I explain the importance of Page Ranks in the following mnemonic, which has served me well:

To get a page to rank, get Page Ranks

Basically Google has 2 different categories of Page Rank. Basic and Green. There are 10 different types of Basic Page Ranks and each of these have different properties. The exact blend of Page Ranks that your site gets from the rest of the websites determines the Green Page Rank score, which is used to decide exactly where it should rank, and what it should rank for.

The 10 different flavours of basic Page Rank are as follows:

Page Rank 1 – User Friendly

Page Rank 2 – Correct Spelling

Page Rank 3 – Meta Keywords Present

Page Rank 4 – Page has a clear semantic latency

Page Rank 5 – Interesting Content

Page Rank 6 – Useful (eg How To Page)

Page Rank 7 – News type website

Page Rank 8 – Highly SEO’d Page

Page Rank 9 – Secret

Page Rank 10 – Website owned by a Googler / Major Government

The Page Rank of 9 is a secret known only by staff at Google, although it is thought to apply to groups of web pages, and be calculated via a pagination probability vector.

Google assesses the blend of basic Page Ranks that link to a page, and then assign it a secondary decimal value which is the green Page Rank that allows it to rank websites. This can also be seen in the Googler tool kit as a green bar (incidentally, green is Sergey Brin’s favourite colour):

How Google uses basic Page Ranks to calculate the Green Page Ranks for a page

Once the googler has done the calculations about how many green page ranks a particular page should be awarded, this figure is stored and then used every time Google has a search for one of the keywords on the page. All of the results are simply ordered in terms of the number of green Page Ranks that the websites have.

Getting more green page ranks can be quite tough, but asking for links from other websites that also have a lot of green page ranks to share is a good method. It is also important to get a lot of basic page ranks that are of the same type as your website, so if you have a news website, it is a good idea to get lots of other websites with Basic Page Rank scores of 7 to link to you.

There are two questions that come up a lot whenever I speak at a conference. The first is whether I will give an autograph, the second is what makes a good keyword. The answer to the first is yes, the answer to the second is a bit more complicated.

A keyword is used by people when they are trying to find something using a search engine like Ask or Hotbot. The user enters the word into the search box, and then the search engine machine takes the word and finds information about it. Think about the search engine like an amazing lock that opens millions of doors, and the keyword as a word that is a key to just one of those doors. When that key is put into the searcher, it unlocks the door and allows the user to get the information that they want.

Knowing which keyword is right for your website is a fairly complex process and when I am providing a keyword for a website, it can take a lot of work to thoroughly investigate the various semantic paths that are possible. For a website that sells a particular product, it is important to look at the various different products on the website. I use a range of special tools including dictionary.com and the thesaurus on Microsoft Word (power tip: highlight the word and press <shift>+F7 and you will get a list of synonyms).

I will usually make a semantic hierarchy diagram like this one:

How a semantic hierarchy looks

This is then provided to the client in order to explain what a user is looking for when they are looking for a product. For a website or web page selling something like dog food, I will create a number of keywords that users are likely to be interested in looking for. Examples would be “canine nutrition”, “labrador meals”, or “Chihuahua Cheese”.

These words should then be inserted strategically throughout the page into the various hotspots like the H3 and Alt Tags. Remember to add them as appropriate to the Meta Keywords element – they should be done alphabetically in order to match the eigenvector distribution patterns that the Googlers look for.

Once Google has visited the page and read the code, they will see the keywords that you have put into the page and make you number one, or at least put you into their results. You can see how well you are doing in Google by searching for your keywords and then seeing where your site ranks. I like to click on the results.

I was just doing some advanced research about some cutting edge SOE techniques for a presentation and training session I will be running later this month, when I noticed a stunning change to the Google home page.

It looks as though the company has rebranded as Googlle – with two Ls:

Is it possible that the Welsh have taken over Google?

One possible reason for this change is that the company has been taken over by the Welsh. This is not as unlikely as you might think. Despite their reputation for being short, thick, and poor, the Welsh are actually quite astute when it comes to business, and thanks to the wealth of gold buried in their mountains, it is quite conceivable that they have sufficient resources to take over a large web searching engine company like Google.

I for one welcome our new Welsh leaders, and look forward to the chance to pit my wits against them in the never ending challenge of getting great rankings for my many fortune 500 clients.

heddwch.

Edit: 8:33pm

It seems as though I may have jumped the gun a little bit on this post. Apparently the ll refers to this being Googles eleventh birthday, however I would still recommend being careful about the Welsh.

The only constant about SOE is change. What worked yesterday won’t work today, although it might work tomorrow, but probably not next Thursday, but it might start to work again in June next year – at least until the end of September, when it will stop working again.

While the hottest technique at the moment is the inclusion of Meta Keywords and eigenvectorising internal dynamic latencies, it is only a matter of time until Google’s algorithms change, and new techniques are required – who knows, next year, something as left field as iterative semantic branching or distributive trust methodologies could be the main way of getting to the top of the search results.

I recently had dinner with a top engineer from Google – lets call him Scat Butts, and he revealed that there is a flaw in the Google Algorithm that acts as a kind of Easter Egg, and releases additional functionality without recourse to other techniuques.

While a number of SOE professionals are now aware of the benefits of Meta Keywords Inclusion, few know about the various other Meta tags that are available including one called Meta Robots.

From my understanding of the conversation, the Meta Robots tag is a direct means of communicating with the Googlers who come to your website to decide how they should treat it. If you don’t use it, your page will be confusing to the googler when he comes to read it:

Googler doesn't know what to do without being able to see the Meta Robots

On the other hand, if you do include meta robots, the following will probably happen:

Googlers know what to do with a page when the Meta Robots are included

How to do it…

From my understanding, the actual inclusion of a Meta Robots element in the page is a surprisingly complex act, and it is essential for any SOE who wants to do this to think carefully about what they are doing. The element is broken into the following parts:

Name

This is where you put the name of the robots that you want to target. Thankfully you do not need to know their actual name – Robby, Metal Mickey, Dalek Sec etc, you just need to know the name of the organisation they are from.

In most cases, you will want to instruct all robots to do something, although there are also specific instructions for individual robots that you might want to consider.

Content

This part is where you put the actual instruction. This can be something like “noindex,follow” if you are an entry level user, however power optimisers can also include more specific instructions such as “rank, 1, loans”, which would advise the search engines that you want to rank at position 1 for the keyword loans.

Rank Command

The Rank command only works in Google, and you will need to add a separate line for each term that you want to rank for – Google does not branch these terms semantically, so if you want to rank for both “loan” and “loans”, which is a plural, you will need to add two lines.

One other thing to remember is that the ranking command uses a Dutch auction model to determine where the site should be placed – imagine if more than one person wanted to rank at number one – there would be chaos at the top of the Serps.

In competitive search results, you might need to put in a value for rank of something like 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000124 in order to rank at the top of the results, however for less competitive terms, you might be able to rank at number one with a bid as high as 10001, as not many people know the technique, and as such are not using it yet.

The full code that you need to add to your pages is as follows:

<meta name="robots" content="rank, 1, SOE" />

Happy optimisation – why not post your successes below along with the ranking number that you needed to add for a number one position.

When most people attempt to build a website, they get all the things wrong that I would get right, and as a result leave themselves needing the services of an SOE professional in order to put the wrong things right. While most of the things that people get wrong can be put right, there are other things that can not. At least without making the client an entirely new web site out of fresh HTML.

The main problem that I see when I am mending websites is one of semantic hierarchies that have been incorrectly structured according to the best principals of linguistic branching. Essentially, people put the right page in the wrong place, and then put the wrong words on the pages in the wrong places so that the only person who knows what should go where, and where to go to get what you want is them.

This is not a great situation to be in. Whenever I am faced with a problem where the website does not use semantic hierarchies in order to create optimal website structures, or fails to incorporate eigenvector considerations, or latent semantic distribution, I find that the preferred solution is to implement a radical paradigm re-definition at the core levels of interpretative correlation.

While this might sound inordinately complex, this is largely due to the vast technical knowledge required to be a top level SOE practitioner. Anyone who remembers the Minnesota update will be able to appreciate the sheer elegance in implementation of the distributive synthesis of vagary that this represents.

Ultimately of course, this blog is all about helping other people to expand their SOE knowledge to the point where they are able to deliver the kind of insight and re-evaluative knowledge required by modern web masters who need the assistance of an SOE. With this in mind, I have added a diagram of a sample semantic hierarchy below that can easily be implemented on most websites in order to create an optimal structure for rankings success:

Correct Semantic Hierarchy

By using this simple semantic hierarchical structure and combining it with the correct distribution of high quality eigenvector sculpting throughout the web site, the Googlers will be able to find and better understand your content and reduce the need for complicated additional syntactic structures within your web site.

Combining a sensibly ordered latent eigenvector strategy within the internal semantic and syntactic structure of your website with correctly implemented meta keywords elements will give your website a genuine boost in its Google rankings, and is also very good help if you want to do well in the Hotbot search engine too.

Over the past few days, you might have heard rumours from some so-called search engine experts that Meta Keywords are not important to get better rankings in Google. Well that’s what they want you to think.

The fact is that this single simple tag is one of, if not the most powerful tools available to any SOE, and simply by adding it into a web page, you can turn it into a lean mean ranking machine.

Quite simply, when the Googlers come to visit your internet site, they want to know what it is about, so they look at the HTML of it, which is pretty amazing. Most people don’t even know what HTML is, I do, and so does Google, and that’s what is important (shared knowledge like that is important in the world of SOE).

When The Googler looks at your HTML, it doesn’t look like a website, it is all full of < and &amp; and <table> type things, and doesn’t make much sense to anyone apart from those with a lot of technical learning time – you can’t even see pictures – Googlers can imagine what they are all about from something called the src – which is how they know what a picture is!

Anyway, to understand whether your webpage is going to be interesting for users to read, they look for what keywords are in the page. If you don’t put keywords in the page, the googler won’t know what its for, and this is what happens:

no keywords, no Google!

On the other hand, if you get it right, then this is what happens:

Meta Keywords make you number 1

What’s the real reason why Google bots are saying that Meta Keywords is useless? It’s because they want to keep all those lovely number one results for themselves. If you want to rank for a keyword, make sure that you put as many of them as you want to rank for into the meta keywords place.

One question that I am frequently asked by people who know very little about search engine optimisation is how to spell SEO.
I tell them in no uncertain terms that they should leave things like this to the experts, rather than trying to do things that are so complex themselves. In most cases, they will cause more problems than solutions, which means that when they finally get round to employing a high powered consultant to do the work for them, there is much more work to do.
While I am all in favour of spreading as much information as possible to the uninitiated, there are some secrets that I am simply unable to share, including how to spell SEO, although this is the kind of information that is often the subject of our conferences.
If you do want to learn how to spell SEO, then it is worth signing up for one of our online training seminars where you can also learn the secrets of SEO that will bring success to your business – including how to improve your meta keyword targeting!

In my recent post, I mentioned the presentation that I gave at the ultra exclusive Tech Genius Conference in Aspen. While this presentation was a very, very advanced subject, at or beyond the cutting edge of SEO, and a long way beyond the comprehension of most readers, I believe that it is definitely of enormous value to anyone who is even slightly interested in developing their skills to the next level.

By reading through the ideas in this presentation, you will be able to understand a great deal more about what is possible in the world of SEO: